Assessment of Basic Approaches to Numerical Modeling of Phase Change Problems—Accuracy, Efficiency, and Parallel Decomposition

Abstract

The fast and accurate modeling of phase change is of a significant importance in many processes from steel casting to latent heat thermal energy storage. The paper presents a numerical case study on the transient 3D heat diffusion problem with phase change. Three different approaches to modeling of the solid–liquid phase change in combination with four commonly used numerical schemes are compared for their efficiency, accuracy, applicability, simplicity of implementation, and robustness. The possibility of parallel decomposition of the approaches is also discussed. The results indicate that the best accuracy was achieved with the second-order implicit methods, and the best efficiency was reached with the simple explicit methods.